Get Involved

We welcome local patients/service users and carers with recent experience of the NHS. We will support you to join the community of patient and carers and help you to take on roles you will enjoy. This ranges from teaching to student selection and support, and seeking and mentoring new members. Your support for teaching will help students become more empathic and patient-centred in every aspect of their work preparing them for their professional practice. Your feedback is vital as we seek to make improvements to our programmes.

Who can join?

Our community represents the diversity of the population of Leicester and the range of health and social care needs.

There are no requirements to join our community - we value patients’ and carers’ willingness to share their individual experiences - your recent and relevant experience of healthcare services are more powerful than textbooks and hugely beneficial to students’ learning.

All members will receive training, mentoring and ongoing support.

Your role

The majority of your role is to share your personal experiences of health and social care with our students at various stages of their education. There will also be roles in the clinical components of our courses that align to specific areas of teaching, such talking about experience of stroke, mental health, surgery, pregnancy and many more.

After training and with experience, a wider range of teaching possibilities will become available, including:

Curriculum development
Leading teaching roles
Mentoring
Committee work
Educational research
Admissions
Support roles within the group
Participation in open days for new prospective students
Student support
Outreach work within Leicester and beyond
Participating in conferences

We also welcome you to join events in our University, which are available to all faculty members. Recently many members have attended mindfulness sessions with our staff.

How to apply

If you are interested in joining the Patient and Carer group, please email patientcarer@leicester.ac.uk.

A community

You will join a diverse community of people and we encourage you to get to know each other.

Social group

The Patient and Carer Group meet socially every summer and before Christmas either face-to-face and or virtually.

Open days

The Patient and Carer Group is an integral element of the Schools and has a presence on University Open days.

The members of the Patient and Carer Group also produce a regular newsletter. This provides an opportunity to engage directly with the Patient and Carer Community. Patients and carers like to talk, but also to listen, support each other and share experiences. The newsletter is a means of doing just that. The newsletter also highlights the role of individual academic staff, who lead the development and delivery of the education provision within the Medical School.